Best Way to Add a Stunning Photo Gallery to Your Website

Author: , January 4, 2012, Leave a comment



The best way to attract visitors and retain those visitors within your website is to make an attractive website with a clean layout, great content, and most importantly photos. Human beings are visual creatures. Visual images appeal to them the most.

Your potential visitor might not have all the time to read your content line by line, but if you can attract them with photos, images and videos then you can convey your important message more clearly.

Images definitely speak louder than words. Photos organized in an album or gallery format with slide show and categorize functions can make your visitor more interested in viewing them. They can capture your visitor’s attention faster and let them recall your site to visit again and again.

Internet provides remarkable utilities to enhance the design of your website. With just a little effort, you can find several tools to help you with adding photos to your own website. These tools including online photo services and software applications which you can use to create, embed and manage a web based photo album.

Photo album software are not only limited to photo gallery makers. Many of them provide functions for you to conveniently categorize your images and add keywords and descriptions, with easy viewing options such as zooming, rotating, and autorun slide show function.

The advantage of using online photo services is that you can upload your photographs with ease as well as manage them without installing any software on your own desktop. However, the main disadvantage is that you cannot have total privacy with your photographs once uploaded. A few websites allow privacy settings to some extent and offer security with your photographs. Since the same doesn’t hold true for all these websites, you should search and use only sites that ensure complete privacy and safety for users’ photos. Another disadvantage is the speed of online photo service, users could have problems with accessing the photographs, especially during peak hour when many people are accessing the site simultaneously.

Many web hosting companies also provide a photo album system as part of their server control panel. The server based photo album system allows you to easily upload your photos onto your own hosting account, and also gives you the freedom to create your own photo gallery using pre-designed templates. Moreover, by using such web hosting packages, you can be assured of privacy of your photos to a great extent. The main disadvantage of using the package provided by a web hosting company is the fact that it is a bundled service. You cannot use their services once you change or switch web hosting companies.

One of the best ways, or the most flexible way to create and maintain a photo album for your website is by using your own flash photo gallery software. A standalone photo gallery software can be installed directly on your own PC, runs fast without any potential connection backlog, and is easy to use with straightforward publishing options.

With a few clicks of the mouse, you can create and manage your own photo album. Photo gallery software are generally easy to use, even novices can use it to create a professional looking photo album for website without any programming skill. You can use photo gallery software to manage photographs both online as well as offline. Lastly, the photo gallery software provides complete privacy with your photographs as they are stored on your own PC, and can be published to any web server of your choice.

Photoshop – 5 Recommended Brushes

Author: , January 4, 2012, Leave a comment



Brushes are a key method of applying effects to an object in Adobe Photoshop. They may be used to add colour, remove colour, replace elements of an image with other areas or simply painting onto sections of an image. Brushes are an import ingredient in your Photoshop life. To master this section the user must first learn the basic brush tool, the others will then become easier to learn as they all adopt the same principle.

1- Brush tool
The basic brush is one of the simplest to use but still the most important. Once the user has mastered this brush the remaining becomes much easier to learn. The user can paint onto an object controlling the opacity, flow and mode of the brush depending on the effect which is required. Photoshop prevents the user from painting onto a type layer. In-order to paint onto a text layer the layer must first be rasterized.

The original brush tool can also be used for masking information. Painting with a black brush will hide image information, painting with a white brush will reveal image information. The process is preferable to the eraser tool. Editing is non destructive, allowing information to be re-edited or deleted if not required.

2- Clone Tool
Used to replace elements of an image with other section from the original image or another. The user will define a source point by using the Alt key. They will paint over the desired area to remove unwanted elements. For best practice clone onto a new blank layer. Ensure sample all layers has been selected in the options bar. To avoid a patchy effect apply the effect in a dabbing motion.

3- Eraser Tool
The most destructive brush tool. Used to permanently remove information from the image. The information can also be gradually removed by reducing the opacity of the brush in the brush options palette.

4- History Brush Tool
Used to paint pre-defined history states onto an image. For example apply levels to an image, record the effect using the ‘create snap shot’ tool. Repeat the process for all other applied colour effects such as hue saturation or levels. To apply the effect select the source for the history brush and paint the effect onto the image were required.

5 – Colour Effect Brush Tools
Includes blur and sharpen tools. The effect is applied using the same principle as the basic brush. Blur tool is used to blur pixel edges ideal for areas of high aliasing. The sharpen tool will sharpen pixel edges.

Used to create basic to complex effects. While using the brush tool the user tends to alter less frequently the hardness of the brush edge. What we do tend to alter is the brush diameter. This can be quickly edited by using the left bracket key to reduce, and the right bracket key to increase size. This principle can be applied regardless of the brush tool being used.

Photo Editing – The Wonders of Photo Manipulation

Author: , January 4, 2012, Leave a comment



Photo editing is not what it used to be. With the presence of image editing software and tutorials on how they could be used, more and more people are dabbling into correcting the photos they took themselves, instead of going to specialists. The advent of the Internet and computers, the darkroom has already become something of the past.

There are still photographers who prefer to practice this almost dying photography method though because they like the idea of working with their hands and using inks and dyes to get the effect that they want, especially when it comes to photo manipulation. However, they are just a chosen few, and most of the people dabbling in photography now are taking advantage of the photo editing capabilities that technology is offering.

What Could Be Done in Image Editing

There are a great number of things that could be done to correct flaws in photos, whether they are portraits or non-portraits. While there are basic adjustments that could be made like red eye removal, correcting color balance or contrast and brightness, and applying some simple special effects like black and white, sepia, there are more advanced photo editing corrections that could do more to the appearance of photos. These include getting rid of excess weight or flab, lessening the appearance of eye bags, whitening the teeth, and getting rid of blemishes on the skin, among many others.

Aside from these, there are also other more advanced editing techniques being used in photo editing, and these include photo manipulation and background removal. Photo manipulation is one of the oldest retouching techniques in the world of photography and deals with a combination of graphic design and photography. Because of this, most of the photos that have gone through this method of photo editing give an appearance of illusion that could mostly be found in photo art. Image warping is one of the easiest photo manipulation techniques used in photo manipulation.

Background removal is also another image editing technique that is commonly used by both professionals and beginners in the world of photography. Aside from this, there are also many now who are venturing into making their own photo collages digitally. While a lot of people may been used to manual kind where gluing is done to post the pictures on a cardboard or paper, more and more now prefer the digital way of gluing photos on their PCs and then adding some effects like mosaics and the picture grid.

What Are Used in Photo Editing Projects

There is a wealth of image editing software available now that could be used so that all these corrections and adjustments could be done. There are others though that are more commonly used than others, and these include Adobe Photoshop and Picasa. If you are planning to use either of the software, you have to be aware Picasa is only good for basic adjustments and bit of advanced photo editing. It is the Adobe Photoshop that could offer you a great number of tools that will enable you to do so much more when it comes to retouching your portraits and non-portraits exceptionally. If you are concerned about whether you would know how to use such tools like the pen, the magnetic lasso and the channel mask, among others, then you should look up some step-by-step tutorials on how they could be used.

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